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To See a Bigger World The Home and Heart of a Hmong American Writer Kao KaLia yang The chapter is an exploration of a Hmong American writer’s journey into being. It is a lyric reflection of why and where a memoirist documents the internal and external landscape of belonging to a people, a place, and a dream. It is an intimate window into the heart and the mind of a young writer and an emergent teacher. This is an exploration of the intersections of the histories and realities that have fueled her abilities and aspirations to documentinliteraturethehumanexperienceof beingHmonginAmerica, being Hmong to the world. “A story is like the stop sign on the road of life. It is supposed to make you stop, look both ways, check the trajectory of the horizon before you continue ,” said Uncle Eng. He added, “You will not find this in a book.” Uncle Eng was right. I could not find his words in any of the hundreds of books I have read over the years. This is the reason I put them into this one—so they could be found and credited to the man who gave me my first alternative reading of a story and its impact. As a child, I wanted to be what so many other young Hmong children were encouraged to become: a doctor or a lawyer. We believed then, as did generations of immigrants and refugees before us (and as perhaps will those who come after), that we needed lawyers to protect the rights we never fully possessed and doctors to heal what was so broken in our bodies . For most of my life, I have been a Hmong girl in the United States. My family immigrated when I was six years and six months old. Like so many daughters who have crossed oceans to begin a life for a family, I was the product of what history and war had taught my people to be: creatures driven by needs, not wants. I remember being a sophomore at Carleton College in Northfield, Kao Kalia Yang Minnesota. We had been in the United States for nearly fifteen years, and the seasons were shifting around me. It was a lovely autumn evening. The sun was burnishing the late afternoon sky in layers of musky orange and soft pink. I was walking from downtown Northfield up the small rise to Carleton. A maroon car stopped by the side of the road in front of me. I thought the men were lost—people got lost looking for students in the small divide between Carleton and St. Olaf. I approached the car thinking I could help. When the passenger side window rolled down, I did not run. When the objects started flying out of the car window, I could not run. I stood still in the wash of soda and the cold of the ice cubes coming at me, the smell of ketchup, the refuse of McDonald’s dripping down over me. Two white men were in the car, and they were calling me names I had never been. Their words again and again were “Go home!” AllofmylifeinAmerica,whenpeopleask,“Whatareyou?”—myimmediate answer is never “I am an American.” It is always “I am Hmong.” During myyearsofgrowingupinAmerica,HmongwasallIhadeverbeenandknew to be. It never crossed my mind that I was growing up Hmong American, that I fully belonged here. But in the safety of Carleton’s brick buildings, its structures of learning and ideas, under the guise of education, on my way to becoming someone that few in my family had ever been—an educated person—I had forgotten momentarily that I was elsewhere than “home.” Home was a story of the tall mountains of Laos. It was a reminder of the refugee camps in Thailand, sites of dust and dirt, of children without pants sitting on pebbly ground. In Minnesota, it was a man walking from a white truck stenciled with the words “Meals on Wheels,” carrying a foil tray with slices of turkey, biscuits, and gravy for our Thanksgiving dinner. Our Christmas gifts came late in the afternoon after Mom and the aunties waited in long lines for coloring books and stuffed animals at the Toys for Tots charity. Home was the annual New Year celebration at the River Centre in St. Paul and the Metrodome in Minneapolis. It was HmongLand rising: the metaphorical space where belonging and home happens within me and, I suspect, many of my Hmong brethren . It is the community we...

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